Liz Cheney's campaign: The final hours

Two days before Christmas, Liz Cheney’s campaign assembled for a full-team conference call. As the members of Cheney’s close-knit political circle checked in, the feedback about the state of her primary challenge to Sen. Mike Enzi was upbeat and the takeaway message was clear: full speed ahead. The candidate joined the line a little late, but nothing else seemed unusual.

No one imagined at the time – except perhaps Cheney herself – that it would be the last war-council call of the campaign.

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Cheney’s announcement Monday that she was pulling out of the Wyoming Senate race immediately prompted suspicion among Washington operatives and donors that her move was an escape hatch for a flailing campaign. They viewed her bid against Enzi as a comedy of errors – an effort plagued from the start by political missteps, public feuding between Cheney and her sister and a nasty back-and-forth between various members of the Cheney family and former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson.

Yet up until this past weekend, there was also a stubborn optimism within the Cheney camp that the race was headed in the right direction, according to interviews with strategists, donors and friends of the candidate. The campaign’s most recent internal polling showed Enzi substantially ahead, but Cheney improving her position; the view of the candidate and the advisers around her was that she had a straightforward path to collecting the 50,000 or so votes she would need to win. She has not yet announced her latest round of fundraising numbers, but in the last three months of the year Cheney recorded her second consecutive million-dollar quarter.

After going dark over the holidays, Cheney’s campaign was poised to go up this week with a new round of TV ads and move toward the next iteration of her message, taking a step beyond introducing the candidate’s biography and toward a larger message touting Cheney as a next-generation conservative leader.

Even as her campaign planned to burst out into the new year with fresh force, however, Cheney’s closest friends and supporters knew that she was grappling with troubling developments at home: her youngest daughter’s juvenile diabetes and a more acute event involving one of her children at college.

The result was an abrupt decision to pull the plug on one of the most closely watched Senate campaigns of the 2014 cycle, and to hit pause – at least for the moment – on the larger dynastic ambitions of the Cheney family.

Unlike many campaigns that end in surprise or disappointment, Cheney’s consultants and advisers say they do not hold her announcement against her – on the contrary, there was uniform respect for her decision. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was intimately involved in planning his daughter’s race, wholly backed her decision to end it, according to one Cheney ally, who said the conservative elder statesman was in “grandfather and father mode.”

Mel Sembler, the former finance chairman of the Republican National Committee and a longtime Cheney family friend, said Liz Cheney was “very optimistic” about her prospects in the race when he spoke to her Monday, and that her choice to drop out was entirely a personal one after “something happened to the family.”

“I was disappointed but I happen to agree with her decision,” said Sembler, who helped lead Cheney’s finance effort. “The contributors – nothing against Enzi – but they just thought it was time for a new, young Republican.”

Whatever the perception of Cheney’s campaign in Washington, Sembler said every donor he asked to host an event for the candidate gladly agreed: “They thought that she was part of a new generation of Republicans.”

As startling as Cheney’s withdrawal was to her allies, it was at least as great a shock – if a more welcome one – to Enzi and the array of operatives and outside groups backing him in the race.